Heterarchical or hierarchical? Egalitarian or unequal? Segmented or complex? Tribe, chiefdom, middle range? All these questions have been vividly discussed in an effort to reconstruct Bronze Age society within a wider area of central Europe. The extensive spectrum of published literature offers varied and often contradictory theoretical models, but we still know very little about the organization of particular social units, especially in the context of settlements. The morphological, technological and spatial analysis of movable and immovable sources from the fortified settlement in Spišský Štvrtok contributes in many respects to solution of the discussed problem in the northeastern Carpathian region. In the case of the Spišský Štvrtok locality, we can interpret the degree of social complexity on the basis of qualitative and quantitative parameters of material culture, evidence of production activities and their specialization level in correlation with spatial distribution of intra-site activity areas. Moreover, the detected tendencies are independently confirmed by the morpho-typological differences between gold and bronze artefacts contained in hoards, by architectonic details and by the presence of regular ritual activities. The achieved results thus indicate possible horizontal and vertical ranking, which was adapted to the local community.

Archaeological analyses of child funerary remains have often revolved around discussions of ascribed status and demographic trends. Other social and spatial dimensions of child burial are often left unexplored. This article introduces a novel perspective, through the analysis of child burials in Predynastic Egypt. My analysis focuses on the changing rates and spatial distribution of child burials in community necropoleis, with special attention to how their placement was used to renegotiate power relationships, and perhaps even concepts of personhood, in Predynastic society. The importance of children's funerals for creating of a sense of community through attachment to place is also considered. Criticizing analyses that rely on quantitative data to the exclusion of other factors, I emphasize the contribution of childhood, practice theory, emotions and personhood for the study of social complexity. My arguments point towards significant changes in the emotional dimension of children's funerary practices experienced during the later fourth millennium bc, and links these transformations to processes of state formation in Egypt.

In this paper, we discuss observations from fieldwork in northern Kenya which revealed solid evidence for a vital ongoing rock art tradition among warriors of Samburu—lmurran. They make rock art during their lives as warriors, typically between the ages of 15 and 30, when they live away from their villages, herding cattle and thus representing a specific ‘community of practice’. Our findings reveal that Samburu rock art is made predominantly as a leisure occupation, while camping in shelters, as part of activities also involving the preparation of food. Typical images include domestic animals, humans (both men and women) and occasionally wild animals such as elephants and rhinos. Each age-set and new generation of lmurran is inspired by previous artwork, but they also change the tradition slightly by adding new elements, such as the recent tradition of writing letters and names close to the images. We conclude that even though rock art as such is not part of any ritual or ceremonial setting, it plays an important role as an inter-generational visual culture that transfers a common ongoing cultural engendered warrior identity through time.

This paper introduces a new art style, Singa Transitional, found painted onto a mountainside near the modern town of Singa in the north of Huánuco, Peru. This style was discovered during a recent regional survey of rock art in the Huánuco region that resulted in the documentation of paintings at more than 20 sites, the identification of their chronological contexts and an analysis of the resulting data for trends in changing social practices over nine millennia. I explore how the style emerged from both regional artistic trends in the medium and broader patterns evident in Andean material culture from multiple media at the time of its creation. I argue that the presence of Singa Transitional demonstrates that local peoples were engaged in broader social trends unfolding during the transition between the Early Horizon (800–200 bc) and the Early Intermediate Period (ad 0–800) in Peru. I propose that rock art placed in prominent places was considered saywa, a type of landscape feature that marked boundaries in and movement through landscapes. Singa Transitional saywas served to advertise the connection between local Andean people and their land and was a medium through which social changes were contested in the Andes.

Medieval women are typically portrayed as secluded, passive agents within castle studies. Although the garden is regarded as associated with women there has been little exploration of this space within medieval archaeology. In this paper, a new methodological framework is used to demonstrate how female agency can be explored in the context of the lived experience of the medieval garden. In particular, this study adopts a novel approach by focusing on relict plants at some medieval castles in Britain and Ireland. Questions are asked about the curation of these plants and the associated social practices of elite women, including their expressions of material piety, during the later medieval period. This provides a way of questioning the ‘sacrality’ of medieval gardening which noblewomen arguably used as a devotional practice and as a means to further their own bodily agency through sympathetic medicine.

In this paper we discuss the universal selection of exceptional materials for tool making in prehistory. The interpretation suggested in the literature for these non-standard materials is usually limited to a general statement, considering possible aesthetic values or a general, mostly unexplained, symbolic meaning. We discuss the implications of viewing these materials as active agents and living vital beings in Palaeolithic archaeology as attested in indigenous hunter-gatherer communities all around the world. We suggest that the use of specific materials in the Palaeolithic was meaningful, and beyond its possible ‘symbolic’ meaning, it reflects deep familiarity and complex relations of early humans with the world surrounding them—humans and other-than-human persons (animals, plants, water and stones)—on which they were dependent. We discuss the perception of tools and the materials from which they are made as reflecting relationships, respectful behaviour and functionality from an ontological point of view. In this spirit, we suggest re-viewing materials as reflecting social, cosmological and ontological world-views of Palaeolithic humans, and looking beyond their economic, functional aspects, as did, perhaps, our ancestors themselves.

In this paper, I present Ethiopia's Boreda lithic practitioners’ perception of knapping stone as a living vital being and how it informs their selection of colourful stones and transmission of knowledge to apprentices. In particular, lithic practitioners select stones which are perceived to exhibit evidence of their vitality in the form of light and choose particular colours of stone for their association with transformation and community identity. Furthermore, elders use these attributes of stone to assist apprentices in learning to identify good-quality parent material, ensuring longevity of a tool's life.

Stories are important to all modern peoples, and this behaviour was no doubt also the case during the deep past. Consequently, it is important that archaeologists understand that artefacts made and discarded thousands of years ago were woven with stories by the peoples who produced them. In some regions of the world, these stories remain accessible by collaborating with the Traditional Owners of the lands from which they were recovered, while in others such an approach is impossible. Nevertheless, researchers need to remember that items carried meaning usually invisible to those outside communities—a principle often taught and cited, but possibly not fully appreciated. Here we tell the Yuin (coastal New South Wales, Australia) story of Gymea and her connection to fishing technologies. This story is told in order to demonstrate the depth of information that is not accessible to archaeologists if Indigenous collaborators are not sought out or available.

Signalling is a critical capacity in modern human cultures but it has often been difficult to identify and understand on lithic artefacts from pre-literate contexts. Often archaeologists have minimized the signalling role of lithic tools by arguing for strong form-function relationships that constrained signalling or else imposed ethnographic information on the archaeological patterns with the assumption they assist in defining the signalling carried out in prehistory. In this paper I present a case study for which it can be shown that function does not correlate with form and that the technology fell out of use 1000–1500 years ago. This means that neither presumptions of continuity in social practice nor reference to tool use provide strong explanations for the size, shape standardization and regional differentiation of Australian microliths. Sender-receiver signalling theory is harnessed to motivate a new synthesis of these microliths, and I demonstrate that not only were these artefacts probably key objects used in public signalling but also that sender-receiver frameworks enable us to infer details about the operation of the signalling system.

Approximately 400,000 years bp, novel technological behaviours appeared in the archaeological record, attested by evidence of the exploitation of previously unused resources and the production of new tools. I have reviewed such innovations, and I discuss them in the frame of the anthropological, palaeoneurological, genetic and behavioural changes that appeared in the Middle Pleistocene. I propose that at this chronology humans started to see the resources as ‘other-than-human’ sentient co-dwellers. The technological innovations expressed this novel cognitive complexity and the possible new things–things, human–things and environment–things relationships. Artefacts and technologies acquired multiple semiotic meanings that were strongly interconnected with the functional value. Ethnoarchaeological evidence suggested the possible symbolic acting beyond these innovations in material culture. This perspective has relevant implications in the archaeology of the ancient Palaeolithic. It suggests the need for a new view of material culture, one that goes beyond the classical list approach in the definition of modern symbolic mediated behaviour. Further, it allows one to overcome the traditional juxtaposition between ancient cultures and Homo sapiens in terms of complexity. The evidence discussed in this paper suggests that the ontological hypothesis could change our view of Middle Pleistocene hominids and the origin and definition of modern behaviour, and test the archaeological visibility of cognition in prehistory.

This paper argues that certain early Palaeolithic artefacts can be viewed as reflecting Readymade concepts and techniques from the world of modern art. I will focus on presenting a theoretical framework for this claim as well as a case study from Late Lower Palaeolithic Qesem Cave, Israel (420,000–200,000 bp). The case study is based on the ‘double patina’ phenomenon (old tools that became patinated by exposure to the elements and were then shaped again). These items, characterized by outstanding colours and textures, were produced following Readymade concepts and techniques applied in the production of tools that are both functional and mnemonic. I suggest that these items acted as mnemonic memory tools that reconnected their users to ancestral (human and non-human) beings as well as to familiar experiences, events, and places.

Indigenous hunter-gatherers view the world differently than do WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) societies. They depend—as in prehistoric times—on intimate relationships with elements such as animals, plants and stones for their successful adaptation and prosperity. The desire to maintain the perceived world-order and ensure the continued availability of whatever is necessary for human existence and well-being thus compelled equal efforts to please these other-than-human counterparts. Relationships of consumption and appreciation characterized human nature as early as the Lower Palaeolithic; the archaeological record reflects such ontological and cosmological conceptions to some extent. Central to my argument are elephants and handaxes, the two pre-eminent Lower Palaeolithic hallmarks of the Old World. I argue that proboscideans had a dual dietary and cosmological significance for early humans during Lower Paleolithic times. The persistent production and use of the ultimate megaherbivore processing tool, the handaxe, coupled with the conspicuous presence of handaxes made of elephant bones, serve as silent testimony for the elephant–handaxe ontological nexus. I will suggest that material culture is a product of people's relationships with the world. Early humans thus tailored their tool kits to the consumption and appreciation of specific animal taxa: in our case, the elephant in the handaxe.